Advanced Affiliate Marketing Strategies For Bloggers

Affiliate marketing is, and will likely always remain, my favorite method for making money online. At the risk of repeating myself, here’s why every blogger should get into the affiliate marketing game –

You make a margin per product sale that is often as good or better than the person or company that produces the product

You don’t have to do any product fulfillment, handle cancellations or any customer service whatsoever

You have a huge range of products to choose from in most mainstream product categories

You can enter new niches any time you like with zero switching cost, simply by finding a new product to promote as an affiliate (this is for those of you who like variety)

If you have a product of your own, one of the best ways to get affiliates to promote your product is to make sales of their product as an affiliate first (this is a big one!)

I could go on, but let’s state the obvious and most important aspect: Affiliate marketing is great because you can make very good money for very little effort.

Don’t get me wrong, it requires effort to get to a situation where you can make money as an affiliate, but once you are there the actual process for making money is very, very simple. It’s as easy as writing a blog post or sending an email.

It’s Like Printing Money

I remember about four years ago reading all those hyped-up sales pages from Internet marketers, and I come across the phrase “it’s like printing money”.

I’ve never been a hater of sales copy, although obvious hype agitates me just like anyone else. I certainly believed that some people were enjoying a situation where they could just send emails and make big money, but I was personally very far away from that. Jealousy mixed with depression about my own results, were the dominant emotions I felt at the time when I read what other people were achieving apparently so easily.

My first attempt at “printing money” as an affiliate was with my blog when it was about six months old. I put in a couple of hours to write a blog post about Perry Marshall’s Definitive Guide To Google AdWords and managed to print about $20 in commissions – one sale.

I was disappointed given it had taken me six months of consistent work on my blog to make that $20, however I was also encouraged. I could see given enough time and energy, that $20 could be $200 and then $2,000 and even $20,000. Today I have the audacity to believe it could be $200,000 one day too.

Fast forward to the year 2009 and the first six month’s of affiliate promotions have gone like this…

Almost $10,000 promoting premium blog themes

$800 in commissions for sending one email recommending a $20 book

$700+ for sending leads to an online course promo

$25,000+ promoting a big product released in March

$10,000 for a home study course launched in May

$4,000 for promoting another home study course in June

…And this doesn’t include the ongoing commissions I’m still earning from previous promotions and recursive products.

All bragging aside, it’s clear for me affiliate income has gone on to become a huge source of income and yes, I now understand what it is like to “print money”.

In most of the examples above all I did was write one blog post and/or possibly one or two emails, and that is it. Some were just one email of a couple of hundred words. Really, that is how hard it is, at least from a physical labor point of view.

So how can you get into a position like this and make big money as an affiliate blogger? Here are my tips…

The Key To Making Top-Dollar Affiliate Income

I don’t have a magic button for you, and no one does, but what I can do is break down some facts regarding my own success.

Let’s start with a really, really important point that on the surface you might not realize is there. This intangible factor is “trust“.

The reason I can make any sales at all is I have built up enough trust with a group of people that they look to me for information about a certain subject and trust any product recommendations I make. That very likely includes you, since you are reading this article.

That trust was created in many ways. If you want to see the very first piece of trust I ever built publicly, go read the very first blog post I made to this blog (well maybe not the very first, but from about January 2005 onwards when I started writing about entrepreneurship).

Each blog post from that point forward has acted as a small tool to build trust. Each podcast I have published does the same, as does every video I make. The free reports I release are huge trust building tools, and when I’m speaking on stage, or during a teleconference or even just networking at an event, I’m building trust.

Not every person is exposed to the same trust building mechanisms, but at some point, every affiliate sale I make happened because I first got the attention of that person, and they trusted me enough to order something through my affiliate link.

So, with that subtle requirement out of the way, let’s take a look at some more practical advanced techniques you use to make more money as an affiliate.

4 Advanced Affiliate Marketing Tips

Here are what I consider the key techniques that really ramped up my success as an affiliate marketer –

1. I operate in the make money online niche.

I’m not going to suggest that you should go out and start promoting in the make money niche, and there’s reasons why I can enjoy success in this market and most people cannot (that’s an entire article in itself), but let’s state another obvious point – “how to make money” is a very profitable market to be in.

Why? – Because a lot of people want to make more money, pretty much everybody on this planet, and it’s a very painful problem that is highly motivating.

The Internet marketing niche also has a constant stream of new products coming out, with powerful marketing behind them. Marketers who market how to market products are very good at marketing (lol!). They wouldn’t be making money in that niche if they weren’t, so as an affiliate for them, it’s easier to make sales since they have a solid process for selling what they sell.

It also helps that there are some very high priced products in this niche with some big commissions – as high as several thousand dollars per sale. This means you can make a lot of money with just a few sales.

This shouldn’t discourage you if you are in another market. I’ve made just as much money selling someone else’s $47 a month membership site product as a $2,000 home study course as an affiliate, so you don’t have to promote high priced items to succeed. What matters is that there are quality products with quality marketing processes available to promote. Many, many other markets also have quality products you can promote (just take a look at the Clickbank marketplace for examples).

I want to be clear one of the main reasons why I make so much money as an affiliate is because I am in the industry I am in. I didn’t plan it that way, but in hindsight it makes a big difference. If you can get into the how to make money/business opportunity/Internet marketing niche, it’s a great one to be in. One day I really should put out a product on how to succeed in this niche (what do you think?).

2. You must leverage an email list

Once again at the risk of sounding like a broken record, let me emphasize how important email marketing is.

I make at least three times as many sales as an affiliate because of email. If I just used my blog I honestly believe I’d be making maybe a quarter of the money I currently make. Email is just that powerful.

Take for example Darren Rowse’s recent release of his “31 Days to Build a Better Blog” book. I was privileged enough to be one of his first affiliate partners and my business partner Gideon Shalwick was too. Gideon sent one email to his list and I sent one email to my list and I’m pretty sure Gideon was the top affiliate and I was second (Gideon offered a bonus, that’s why he did better – see the next point).

Darren noticed the impact of email too and wrote about the results saying that email promos where converting better than blog posts and blog posts were converting better than Twitter tweets (that to me is a representation of the best online marketing mechanisms we have online today and the order of effectiveness too: 1. Email 2. Blog 3. Twitter).

I could go and on about how to effectively use email and a blog together to make affiliate sales, but this article is long enough, I’ll save that for another day.

The lesson: Go register for an Aweber account and start building your list.

3. Offer bonuses as incentives

You may have noticed that I’ve been consistently offering different bonuses if people order products through my affiliate link. This is nothing new in the Internet marketing world, yet so few people do it.

The problem most people have is they just don’t have good bonuses to offer. If you don’t have your own high perceived value products to include and you’re not prepared to make some kind of quality bonus, then this technique won’t work.

Sure you can buy PLR articles or ebooks and throw them in, but if they are not quality products, they have low perceived value or they are not congruent with the affiliate offer you are making, it’s not going to help you make more sales.

Bonuses that are congruent with the affiliate offer being made are fantastic incentives for people to buy from you. That makes sense, however there is another benefit of offering bonuses you may not know about.

Including a bonus means you can “track” your affiliate orders. Let’s me state an unfortunate truth – affiliate tracking systems, even the best ones, will not track every sale you make. Cookies can be cleared or blocked, scripts may not track accurately or another affiliate might nab your referral just as the product goes on sale. This sucks, but you have to accept it because that’s just the way it is right now.

Offering a bonus means that when a person comes to claim it from you, you can correlate their order and ensure you get credit. I’ve gained several thousands of dollars just in the last six months when orders were not correctly counted as mine, so when a person comes claiming a bonus, they can then ensure you get credit. This is a very important, if rarely talked about, benefit of offering bonuses.

If you can find a way to come up with a valuable and relevant bonus when doing an affiliate promotion, go for it, it’s a great way to increase your sales.

4. Access to more people (More Traffic)

Most affiliate marketing trainers emphasize improving conversion and I’d be an idiot not to agree with that. However, and this is simply a result of my own dislike of conversion testing, I’ve tended to focus more on attracting more people than conversion, which has resulted in more sales.

That first $20 affiliate sale all those years ago became a $200 sale because I went from 500 visitors a day to 5000. I’ve had $20,000 affiliate commission pay days because I can reach 50,000 plus people via email and another 20,000 via my blog. My conversion rate hasn’t changed much, but my access to an audience has.

It may seem obvious, but the more traffic you have the more you can make as an affiliate. Profit is a function of traffic, especially as an affiliate marketer. Improving conversion is obviously a good idea, but don’t forget that having influence over a steadily increasing audience size – especially if your traffic grows organically – is a sure-fire way to increase sales.

As an encouragement, consider how much money you make now as an affiliate and then consider what it might be like if you can double, triple or even multiply your traffic by ten times. Do the numbers look a lot better than? Yeah, I bet they do.

It’s tough at the beginning, but if you have faith and the trends show that you are growing, it’s only a matter of time before you will make more money because you will have more traffic, as long as you keep doing what you are doing.

Simple In Principle

I’ve laid out some of the big “secrets” to making the big dollars as an affiliate product selling blogger. These are of course the elements that have impacted me the most, and no situation is the same across the board.

Some crazy fools like Shoemoney love to improve conversion – it’s a passion for them – so getting extreme leverage is possible and thus huge affiliate income is a daily result.

Understand that the potential exists for everyone, if you’re prepared to put in the work to get good at something and lay the foundation for the day when you can “print money” – even print four and five figure pay days on a regular basis.

63 Comments

I probably can’t express to you how useful this post is going to be for me. I have really been studying affiliate marketing more and more lately, but this post covers a lot more in one than a few Ebooks I read have.

Hi Yaro. Great points in your post, thank you. The “subtle requirement” of trust that you mentioned is so important. There are a few marketers that I really trusted but now am getting very wary of their “recommendations”. After discovering one product they promoted was a little “off” I didn’t completely lose trust but when they recommended a second product that I knew wasn’t really kosher, well there went my trust. So it might seem ‘subtle’ but I feel that if you have a list of loyal followers it’s important to not lose the trust you’ve worked hard to gain which can happen from one or two misplaced recommendations as an affiliate.

It’s a fine line in the ‘make money online’ niche as to how to foster relationships in your network without feeling obliged to promote products that you don’t believe are useful and or look like they might not deliver on their promise, or worse still that involve unethical style launches. It would be great to know how you handle this diplomatically.

Printing money…well I’m certainly looking forward to the day I can have a $20,000 pay day and help people tremendously at the same time like you’re doing.

Yaro, you mentioned several times in your post you feared sounding like a broken record. Personally I don’t think you can ever offer this kind of advice too often. It’s important information that nay inexperienced affiliate marketer must understand if they expect to see any kind of tangible results.

It’s important to note that trust is the biggest factor of all when it comes to affiliate marketing. If your going to promote a product make absolute certain that the product is everything that the sales page says it is.

We all know just how much garbage there is on offer, usually behind a squeeze page that is full of hype declaring that you will make your fortune overnight. New marketers need to realise that success doesn’t happen overnight. There are certainly plenty of successful marketers who have had some great overnight results but these are people who have been in the industry for a long time, have built a massive list, have built a reputation of integrity, have built a network of affiliates to promote their products and its through that persistent effort that they achieve those results.

I do not subscribe to the view that you can make a fortune overnight at all ever!

But with commitment, consistency, integrity and ethical promotions, you can achieve great success so long as what you are offering delivers exactly or at least very close to what the sales page said it would.

If not you may as well just throw your list away and go back to your job because when it comes to trust, if you lose that, you’ll never get it back again.

Trust is definitely needed to help in conversion. People trust you more if you put more of yourself out there (podcasting,videos) and they can see that it is a real person. If they like what you are saying and think that you are pretty nice guy, more often than not they will buy the products you recommended.

Yes, from my experience it is a lot of work getting the site noticed, but if you keep the blog full of upto date and ‘coming soon’ products the affiliate money will come in.

Its also predictable, for example give a big push on building your products a few months before the event, for example chocolates before valentines day, toys before Xmas to ensure your products are indexed and ready in time.

Till today I only earn about 100 to 200 dollar a month from recurring affiliate program, and I think trust is really important, if some one trust you, is a matter of time he will become your customer, but if once he become your customer and you stop giving value to him, relationship will drop and the trust is gone.
So even if you had trust make sure the second most important thing you need is maintain the trust!

The thing is, trust is fragile, especially in the smaller niches. I’m new to online marketing, both as a marketer and as a consumer, and I see more of a delicate balance teetering along.

Misjudge your market for a moment, and readers ignore you, which is a best case scenario. Because the worst case scenario is that they vanish. They unsub, and they leave.

And, as a consumer in a larger niche, I see just too many offers cross my desk. Exploring them takes a lot of time. Hour-long launch videos? Good thing the format tends to be the same – I’ve gotten to where I fast forward through the lifestyle and testimonial area to “the meat.” I do buy some products. But as I’ve become more of an educated online product consumer, I’ve become more selective.

Plus, I know that, as a consumer, I feel myself getting numb after a while. So many launches, so little time.

As usual, very good post Yaro. I agree with affiliate marketing especially for those that may not have their own product or service yet. Building a relationship with your audience is key because if people don’t trust you they won’t buy from you. I’m working my affiliate strategy in little by little and hope to have my first sales shortly. Concentrating on building great content first.

Love your article, this is a keeper for sure. I’ve enjoyed some commissions from your Blog Mastermind program and look forward to continuing to build on that.

I was never really motivated to promote affiliate programs before but I’m slowly growing into liking it. I guess at first it’s discouraging like you said when you only sold X amount and you put some good effort into it.

To encourage anyone out there, I had only about $900 in affiliate commission all of last year and so far this year I’m up to almost $3000. Prior to all of that, yes I was getting monthly commissions but it was much lower… maybe you could also mention it’s great to buy a blog that alreay has traffic.

You raised a great point #1. I made the mistake of trying to make money in the “hobbies” market. There were no affiliate programs, all the website owners don’t know internet marketing, etc… It was a nightmare. At least it was for me.

We should stick to niches that have been proven to be profitable. “Make money online” niche is definitely one of best. Other proven niches can be found here:

I agree, affiliate marketing is one of the best ways to make passive income in the long run when combined with white hat SEO. So many long tail keywords to get out there and its getting better. Opportunity is everywhere out there for everyone!

So you increased your traffic to get more sales. I could only image what the sales would be like if you tested and tweaked the sales page to convert more. Hmm. Money in the bank. Testing is a pain but it could be the difference of 20 sales or 20 more additional sales.

I like how you really tell it all. A lot of internet marketers give you all but the most important part.

The ‘make money’ niche is definitely the all time most profitable niche and always will be. Its the one problem there is no solution to, everyone always wants more money and if you can teach them how to get more you will be paid well.

Good tips! The competition is huge in the “make money online niche”.It doesn´t hurt to try other less competitive niches as well (on the side).It´s always a good idea to diversify your income and get more income streams.

You might be one of the rare marketers talking about the relationship between affiliate sales and the size of your list or traffic.

I’m not big on conversions stats because I’m not that good at understanding that aspect of internet marketing, but I do understand the concept of putting regular quality blog posts on my site and attracting readers who want to know more on a daily base.

Nice one Yaro – another valuable article. In these days of ‘information overload’ quite a few of the top marketers offer similar advice – to not subscribe to loads of lists – unsubscribe from most and just follow one or two – those which provide high value and which you can put to use..

I do try new ones every now and then if they look very good – but I only have two that are long term – and yours is one of them

Keep up the great content Yaro,

– wishing you continued success,
Paul.

p.s. – Can I ask – has the UltimateFooter made a difference to subscriptions?

I’ve looked at a few ways of monetising my blog, and I’ve been reading many articles stating affiliate marketing as the best way to go. I’m definitely going to get in there and give it a try, and hopefully I’ll have some results similar to you Yaro!

The way I see it, affiliate marketing is a real and working system based on the old pyramid scheme. Thing is here, with the Internet constructed the way it is, it can be actually profitable (in some way) to all parties involved. It’s a win-win.

When it comes to affiliate marketing, it is so important to find a hungry crowd first. Once we locate a niche full of people who are willing to spend money, we would be able to print solid cash day in day out.

Niches like “make money online”, “Internet marketing” and “weight loss” are just a few examples that represent a group of people who want to solve their problems and look for an effective solution.

Although I personally recommend every beginners to stay away from some of the above-mentioned niches, I must say that they are so profitable.

But, the rules have changed since the beginning of Affiliate Marketing. Now, it does not work anymore to just have a website promoting a bunch of products and services and expecting tons of money to pull in.

Due to the heavy competition and information overload out there, you have to be unique. You should be creative and give value to your visitors. Gaining their trust is the secret key to the affiliate marketing business.

By over-delivering the needed information to our audience, we could attract their attention and get credit from them. That way, we would be able to recommend an affiliate offer and expect them to take the desired action.

Yaro, you revealed a very important secret of Affiliate Marketing and explained the highly effective tips and strategies. Thanks for that!

I think this is the first time I have heard someone admitting that working in the “make money online” niche is a major factor in their financial wealth.

I have recently been contemplating about doing affiliate marketing and I reached the same conclusion. If you wanna make big bucks as an affiliate marketer, there’s no better niche than internet marketing.

If you have some obscure hobby or passion, forget about it. Yes, I could make some money promoting astronomy books and telescopes, but that would barley make me enough to buy my daily dose of milk.

One more thing…targeting the English speaking population of the planet also helps a lot. In my country, affiliate programs are few and far between and the market is very small too. So, if you plan to promote to a non-English speaking speaking community, you’ll have a hard time just to make a few bucks a month.

Anyway, I know complaining is not the right mindset to achieve success. So, I’ll shut up.

I’ve been following you since you had 2,000 RSS Readers in 2007 and of course subscribed to your Newsletter at that time. In August of 2008 we finally met in person and then I later registered for Blog Mastermind. Last month I had my first $1,000 month and my blog keeps growing.

I only see good things come from you – keep it up.

You’re a real example of the get-rich-slowly concept, but ultimately I don’t think there is any other way. Besides, what’s the hurry?

Now that I’m seeing results, I feel better about the path I’m on. The only (bad) thing I would have to say is that if you’re going to offer an affiliate product or your own, I will more than likely buy your product before I buy an affiliate recommendation because you’re stuff is so good

Wow, extremely simple and thought-provoking post. I had no idea how powerful email marketing and building trust with my audience was. So let’s say you’re interested in blasting out a product, do you choose the one that has a proven conversion rate or one that you have tried and know to be a value adder for your subscribers?

If anyone’s ever played The Sims, or is familiar with it, you’ll know there is a cheat code to make money. On the first version of The Sims, you would type in Rosebud; and get thousands of dollars each time you did this.

This sounds kind of like a real life rosebud Cheat Code, you just have to learn how to crack it.

I have recently turned to affiliate marketing and it has not been a very easy ride so far. One of the main areas to take care in affiliate marketing is to cater to what the readers may actually need. This turns out to be a tough nut to crack many a times.

I was all ready to start doing affiliate marketing and the state that I live in is killing the idea. I live in NC and Amazon and Overstock have already pulled out because of some tax legislation that would make them responsible for collecting taxes here. Do you have any advice?

I’ve seen bloggers in the weight loss niche doing a great job with affiliate marketing. Especially if you’re fat and are doing the thing for passion. You buy products, use ‘em, and give review of them on your blog with your link, you’re bound to make money from there.

My blog is my hobby. It’s 6 months old, but not yet grown for I only do blogging in my free-employment hours. I only monetizes it from Google adsense. Because of this post, I will surely experiment monetizing from affiliate marketing.

Abdul i wold disagree, the weight loss niche is over populated, to many, way to many are using that niche, same as pharmaceuticals, web hosting, there are quite old and exploited, if you want to make money you need to find something else, brainstorm ideas til you get the perfect one.

Affiliate marketing is a great arena to get into no matter if you are the one advertising the product or if you are the one putting the product for others to market for you. It is a win-win situation for all parties involved.

Wow, i like the concept of printing money. I promise to myself, if my blog get 1000, i will enter the field of affiliate marketing. Because, it’s useless if our blog can only generate a small visitors. My blog is about Blog Tutorial, i think i want to sell a kindle Amazon, because it is related with blogging. Cool idea.

I am two months into my first real attempt at making money online. I am just building posts and articles at present and have not really put a lot of time into traffic generation. I intend to begin heavier promotion of the site around the start of December.

I know I will succeed because I have a plan, but it is nice to be able to check back to as informative a site as this one is – just to be sure.

i noticed over at Pro-blogger that your Blog Mastermind program is promoted through an affiliate program – am I correct? If this is the case I would love to promote your Mastermind program at some point down the road. Not yet though, as I have not generated enough traffic or “Trust” to be successful.

Can you contact me through my email and let me know how I would go about doing this and at what stage of my development you would feel comfortable accepting me as an affiliate member. Thanks in advance.

You throw out so many ideas that I sometimes feel like I am in a candy store. Thanks again..

Yaro, thanks for sharing this very informational blog. You have inspired me to be the best that I can and to continue to explore blogging. Please continue sharing your thoughts and researches because your effort is very much appreciated. kudos!